Against Trump’s threat to raise tariffs against imports from China, the Chinese government announced a temporary moratorium on the export of certain rare earth elements to the U.S.

THE World Bank has recently published a list of Gini coefficients for 61 countries relating in some cases to income distribution and in others to consumption expenditure distribution.

Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” which got passed by both houses in the U.S. and has now become law, is a massive assault on welfare spending.

It is very important to distinguish between the Left criticism and the neoliberal criticism of the dirigiste strategy.

When Bertolt Brecht wrote: “Hungry man; reach for the book” he was articulating the Left attitude to education, as something that broadens perceptions and hence is essentially emancipatory. The fascist attitude to education is diametrically opposite to this.

THERE is an upsurge in military expenditure all over the world which is spearheaded by the upsurge in Europe.

THE mercantilists had defined a nation’s prosperity in terms of the amount of precious metals it possessed and a nation’s progress in terms of the increase in its amount of precious metals.

JEAN-BAPTISTE Say, a French economist who wrote in the late eighteenth century, had formulated a law to the effect that ‘supply creates its own demand’, which meant that there could never be an inadequate demand for the aggregate of goods produced in any economy.

NAZI Germany was basically defeated by the Soviet Union. The sacrifice made by the Soviet people in defence of their country in that war was utterly unimaginable.

Francophone Africa was never fully decolonised.

ELEMENTARY textbooks in economics invariably begin with a completely mythical concept: the concept of “perfect competition”, which is different from the concept of “free competition” that the classical economists and Marx had used.

Let us forget for a moment the fact that the very existence of Israel is an instance of ruthless settler colonialism that has displaced millions of Palestinians and taken over their land.

DONALD Trump has put off his proposed tariffs by ninety days; but countries like India have to respond to Trump’s measures whether now or after ninety days.

It is important for an intellectual position not only to be right but to be right for the right reasons; and the near-universal condemnation of Donald Trump’s aggressive imposition of tariffs, though right, is right for the wrong reasons.

ONE of the puzzling phenomena in world capitalism today is the bellicosity displayed by Europe vis-à-vis Russia.

Nobody can claim that the rate of growth of agricultural production, especially of food grain production, has been higher in the neoliberal period than during the years of dirigiste development that preceded it; it may have been somewhat lower but let us agree that it is certainly no higher.

The Trump strategy for the revival of imperialism amounts to having one’s cake and eating it too.

The official hope is that the workers’ bargaining strength gets sufficiently lowered by having greater unemployment so that they cannot bargain for higher money wages to compensate for the price-rise, because of which inflation would eventually peter out.

While it is certainly true that Trumpism is not identical with capitalism per se, it would be a mistake to see Trumpism as a completely separate and alien phenomenon.

A CHORUS of “establishment” voices, from consultancy firms to the financial press, has been demanding a boost to domestic consumption as a means of reviving the flagging growth rate of the Indian economy. The latest to join this chorus is the Reserve Bank of India which in its latest Bulletin has asked for a boost to consumption to “rekindle the animal spirits” of the “entrepreneurs” in the economy.